Kant on Rape
According to Immanuel Kant, it is better for a woman to die resisting rape than suffer the ‘dishonour’ of submitting to her attacker:
No matter what torments I have to suffer, I can live morally. I must suffer them all, including the torments of death, rather than commit a disgraceful action. The moment I can no longer live in honour but become unworthy of life by such an action, I can no longer live at all. Thus it is far better to die honoured and respected than to prolong one’s life … by a disgraceful act … If, for instance, a woman cannot preserve her life any longer except by surrendering her person to the will of another, she is bound to give up her life rather than dishonour humanity in her own person, which is what she would be doing in giving herself up as a thing to the will of another.1
Kant had earlier offered Livy’s The Rape of Lucretia as a case-study of a woman who killed herself out of shame after being raped:
Lucretia . . . killed herself, but on grounds of modesty and in a fury of vengeance. It is obviously our duty to preserve our honour, particularly in relation to the opposite sex . . . . [B]ut we must endeavour to save our honour only to this extent, that we ought not to surrender it for selfish and lustful purposes. To do what Lucretia did is to adopt a remedy which is not at our disposal; it would have been better had she defended her honour unto death.2
So, it was morally wrong for Lucretia to commit suicide after suffering a brutal assault; far better that she should have resisted to such an extent that her attacker was forced to kill her. Any woman who survives an attack should, in addition to the physical and emotional suffering she has already experienced, feel guilt in her own complicity (in that Kant regards death as a real and preferable option). In Kant’s view, she is party to the crime she has suffered. As Alan Soble notes in his article ‘Kant and Sexual Perversion’, “Kant is genuinely stubborn about the moral significance of such duties-to-self.”3 Perversely stubborn, I would say.
CITATIONS:
1. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1963), p. 156. Quoted in Alan Soble, ‘Kant and Sexual Perversion’, The Monist 86:1 (Jan. 2003), pp. 55-89. [Available at Soble’s website.]
2. ibid. p.149-50. [Also in Soble]
3. See Soble [link above].
Comments
13 Comments so far
Perhaps if the raped woman had better support and been offered councilling, she may not have wanted to kill herself.
I can also recommend Soble’s article on the philosophy of sexuality where Kant is a representative of a metaphysical pessimist.
“Perhaps if the raped woman had better support and been offered counseling, she may not have wanted to kill herself. ”
This comment seems to be missing the point of this post – Kant clearly thinks it should never have gotten to the point of Lucretia taking her own life out of shame (or receiving counseling), simply because she should have resisted her attacker to the death.
Kant is perversely stubborn about lots of things… but this is an interesting example.
The second of Kant’s passages does not say that Lucretia ought to have defended herself to the death. It says that defending herself to the death would have been better than suicide. That A is a better act than an immoral act B does not entail that A is a permissible, much less obligatory, act. (Theft is better than murder.) I am not saying that Kant doesn’t think that one should futilely defend oneself to the death, but the passage does not prove it.
The first passage seems to support a different claim: We should rather die than to actually cooperate in an evil act. I am taking “surrender” as something active here, because Kant talks of an “act”.
Presumably, it is not crazy to suppose that we should be willing to die rather than cooperate in the rape of a third party, though one needs to make distinctions between different kinds of cooperation to make this claim defensible. But on Kantian grounds the rape of oneself is no less an evil than the rape of a third party, since both are equally cases of a person being used as a mere means, and so we should be willing to die rather than cooperate in the rape of ourselves. That strikes me as correct once we qualify it appropriately by making the right distinctions about the different ways one can cooperate with an evildoer.
“The second of Kant’s passages does not say that Lucretia ought to have defended herself to the death. ”
Certainly, the second paragraph doesn’t say that literally, I’m reading it in light of what we know about Kant’s views from the first quotation. Soble does exactly the same, and I don’t think that it’s in any way unreasonable.
As for the rest of it, I don’t see how submitting to rape can be seen as the moral equivalent of abetting the rape of a third party. To submit to rape is to cooperate with the rapist? If I submit to a mugger and give him my wallet, am I cooperating with him (i.e. working together to achieve a common goal) or am I simply being pragmatic about what is ultimately in my best interests?
Obviously, on strict Kantian grounds the rape of oneself is no less an evil than the rape of a third party, but that’s the point being made here: there’s something seriously amiss with the inflexibility of Kant’s thoughts on duties-to-self. Take another example Soble quotes from the Lectures on Ethics: “Neither can we without destroying our person [our humanity] abandon ourselves to others in order to satisfy their desires, even though it be done to save parents and friends from death.” Just how many lives is one person’s honour worth?
Simply restating Kant’s argument doesn’t make it any more convincing or his application of it any less perverse.
I think “honour” is an unfortunate word for Kant to have used, and I am guessing (if not, then his view is not defensible) that he means here respect for self. If that’s right, then the question “Just how many lives is one person’s honour worth?” is one that Kant will simply reject, since things with dignity are not to be weighed against one another. When a Kantian refuses to lie, even though lying would have saved a life, she is not weighing the value of her self-respect against the value of the life. There is no weighing at all: she is simply applying the Categorical Imperative, which, Kant thinks, prohibits her from lying.
The mugger case might be a problem for Kant. It’s tempting to say: one is not choosing survival over self-respect, but survival over money. But there is still a problem, the problem of cooperating with the evildoer. I think two things can be said here, though the first one is perhaps one Kant won’t like. (1) The telos of money is human survival, and rights of ownership to some extent disappear when survival is at stake, so that, e.g., if one is starving, one is permitted to take money from the rich (Aquinas thinks something like this), and when one is being mugged, one is permitted to hand over money. (2) The wrong in theft consists solely in the lack of consent on the part of the victim, and so it is permissible for the victim to cooperate; the wrong in rape consists primarily in the lack of consent on the part of the victim, but in the case of non-marital rape, sexual congress would also be wrong even if the victim consented–it would be fornication then.
I am guessing Kant would go for (2). Myself, I think there is something to both answers.
Note that there is the following relatively uncontroversial disanalogy between the mugging and the rape cases. It would be wrong to cooperate at gunpoint in the rape of a third party (though one needs to make a distinction between different kinds of help; it would be wrong to promote the bad end). But it might not be wrong to cooperate at gunpoint in the mugging of a third party, as long as one cooperated in the taking of money and not the threatening. E.g., if the mugger said: “Go, get his wallet and give it to me, or I’ll shoot you”, it would seem permissible to do that (even more clearly so if the mugger said that if one doesn’t do it, he’ll shoot both you and the victim), even if the victim did not even exhibit the kind of consent-under-duress that victims who hand over their wallets exhibit. I think this supports point (1).
I’m afraid you made entirely too much of that analogy. My primary point was to draw attention to this equating of ’submission’ with ‘cooperation’, particularly due to the connotations of that description in the case of rape. You end up supporting the position that submitting to rape is ‘cooperating with an evildoer’ (the rapist); the rape victim ends up being judged complicit in the crime committed against her. I find this absolutist enforcement of Kantian imperatives morally repugnant. The case itself is a classic example of where complying with deontological norms has bad consequences (in that the victim is expected to die), and it could be easily be avoided by a more flexible application of the rule, or a provision within the rule that prevents cases like this arising. It is Kant’s unnecessary rigidity and utter disregard for consequences that I have, since the start, been opposed to.
But you’re absolutely right, Kant would never weigh one person’s self-respect against another’s life (or any number of lives), just as he would never weigh losing one’s life against being raped. And that, I believe, is the critical weakness to his moral theory and the deplorable inflexibility with which he applies it.
“Thus it is far better to die honoured and respected than to prolong one’s life by a disgraceful act”
Only a Christian could consider such pointless self- destruction virtuous.
~ Maybe Kant would sing another tune if he were raped.
Ah, I don’t think that would really solve the philosophical issue, which is our primary concern here.
And anyway, if Kant were true to his own principles, he would fight to the death before letting it happen, which would somewhat impede any singing opportunities.
‘To cooperate in the rape of oneself’ is surely an oxymoron of epic proportions. Such a phrase smacks of the age-old assumption that women secretly really want to be raped, or invite it by their actions or dress. Rape, however, is defined as such by the complete lack of consent of the victim, male or female. As Chris Matthews says, there is a huge and absolute difference between ’submitting’ and ‘co-operating’. Frankly, I am amazed that someone had to point this out. If there is ‘a philosophical issue’ to be debated here, it is why abstract rationality has been allowed to form the basis for ethics in the Western tradition, discounting the complex claims of emotion, empathy, and lived experience. This fundamentalist faith in rationality is at the root of Kant’s inflexibility, I suspect.
Well so many feminists think that rape is worse than death and so the penalty for rape must be harsher than that even for murder. If they truly believed that, they would have agreed with Kant’s view here.